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From: "David W. Fenton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
My experience with Score users is that they have a version of Stockholm Syndrome, having adapted to the oddities of Score so much that they seem them as advantages.
this is not so different from finale (or sibelius); plugins/programmes are developed to deal with the programme's shortcomings. without TGTools and patterson's PIs finale is in my opinion a not-quite professional programme for publication. finale and sibelius have improved on the oddities that have existed, but there are still things that do not work 100%. in score, you can write 15 or so levels of information for every single note, so the control you have over individual elements in finale or sibelius is hardly comparable to score.
I haven't seen Score output recently. It used to be vastly superior to Finale (even done by a gifted Finale engraver).
i visited someone today who showed me some very decent examples by his company, created with finale, score and sibelius. i could tell which was which in most of the cases, but doubt that the average user could tell the difference. finale is far superior in dealing with complex part extraction than score or sibelius, but score's spacing is much more sophisticated. there are a number of similar examples... virtually everything i saw today (and most of the work i have done as well) could be done on any of the three programmes to the same level of quality - if you have the eye and patience for it. however, because of the differences in the various programmes, certain tasks take far more time to do in one or another programme.
also, based on responses i got recently on the score forum, it seems to me that the community of score users is simply in general far more interested in quality output than the sibelius or finale community. of course there are exceptions, but there seems to be a higher percentage of high-end users of score than of finale or sibelius. there are a greater number of people working for important publishing houses, and i am sure that very few people -- if any -- from the film music communities, pop music and church music communities (where quality is a luxury not an essential) work with score.
because of the nature of the programme (especially before the update in 1999) it would have been necessary to actually know something about engraving traditions, about orchestration, about composition even, before being able to even begin to work in score. as we all know, none of these skills are prerequisites to producing output in finale or sibelius. and since finale is not developed by musicians...
But I always found it extremely difficult to use, and not very helpful for new engraving, as the page layout had to be completely fixed before you started engraving.
this is a question of working methodology. the programme was developed by knowledgeable engravers from the start, i.e. the goal has always been high-quality publishing level output (judged by existing plate-publishing standards). the thinking in score reflects this almost exactly, yes the entire layout has to be planned in advance, as was the case with plate engraving.
i am currently in the beginning stages of a large project with finale 2007 (my 1st with F07), and have so far appreciated many of the important improvements. i am somewhat disappointed to think that possibly the only reason for us finally having received what i consider to be a significant upgrade (assuming small bugs will be ironed out in updates and not added as future "features") is the fact that sibelius has been kicking finale's ass recently. and i now wonder what the sale of sibelius to digidesign will mean for finale... if there is no longer any real competitor to whip them in line every once in awhile... it could **(again)** mean more bogus updates with half-ass attempts at fixing long-standing bugs and improvements to real features that were never incompletely developed in the first place being marketed as "new and exciting features".
again, i encourage everyone interested in publication-quality engraving to look into score. i also encourage anyone who has ever considered abandoning finale (for sibelius, notewriter, or even for that hack programme lilypond) to let makemusic know the reasons why. <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] with Finale>
for me, what is keeping me from leaving finale for score is essentially a question of time: i simply can't afford the time to learn score to the same level i know finale . also there is a very different way of thinking for working in score that is simply terribly foreign to me. it's not better or worse, just so different that i won't even consider investing the time... at the moment. score certainly has its idiosyncracies, it has an entirely different way of thinking, of planning your work, and after seriously looking into it i have decided -- for the moment -- not to purchase it and abandon finale. however, as soon as the development of the graphic user interface for score is completed (along with some hoped-for updates) i will seriously reconsider score, even if it will mean switching from mac to PC.
jef -- shirling & neueweise ... new music publishers mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] :.../ http://newmusicnotation.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
